


all the love you won't forget

by shellsinsand



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:13:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27751354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellsinsand/pseuds/shellsinsand
Summary: The Guardians are always despairing with Chirrut; Chirrut who is small and wily, both too faithful and not obedient enough.
Relationships: Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus
Comments: 1
Kudos: 29





	all the love you won't forget

The Guardians are always despairing with Chirrut; Chirrut who is small and wily, both too faithful and not obedient enough. Baze swears he’s seen more of the Temple than any of the Guardians, except maybe the Elders, just from pulling him from the dusty labyrinth of unused corridors. It’s never as hard as it ought to be, finding him, not for Baze.

( _“I’m One with the Force,” Chirrut says, laughter bright and tinged with sunlight, tangled up in Baze’s sheets. “You could not lose me if you tried.”_

“ _It is not the Force that worries me,”_ _he says, running his thumb over the arch of Chirrut’s brow._ _Baze does not have the Force the way Chirrut does, but he is young, and his faith in it sits easy in his ribs.)_

This week he finds himself wandering deeper and deeper into the Temple, until the air smells more of dirt than sky. It’s quiet – just him and the crumbling foundation and the surety that Chirrut is down here somewhere. Jedha is a desert planet and there’s something comforting about the cool enclosure of the earth, the weight of the history the sands have buried. There are no pilgrims to protect here, or perhaps Baze is the pilgrim.

He finds Chirrut splayed on the floor in a room full of light; no, full of life. Kyber crystals glitter, gripping the ceiling and the walls, jutting up from the floor. Baze grips the frame of the door, roughshod, because the room’s not a room at all, just a crystal vein that someone long ago had widened into a cave.

“They were singing,” Chirrut says, soft; he doesn’t open his eyes. He looks like an aurora, every molecule lit up.

(Baze wonders about Chirrut sometimes, if the Jedi had come for him or if the Force had hidden him from them. When the first whispers of Vadar reach them Baze will spend six hours on the roof of the temple, paralyzed by his own relief, so grateful it hurts. But that has yet to come, for now there is just Chirrut, a supernova playing at being a sun because he likes to watch the shockwaves.)

“No,” Chirrut says, blinking up at Baze, smile stretching slow over his face. Despite Chirrut’s complete inability to _see_ him staring Baze has no doubt that he’s been caught. There’s no sense in a seventeen year old looking like this: like the Force has given him, and only him, the punchline to the joke. “They were not singing for me; they just appreciate an audience.”

“We’ll be late for prayer,” Baze says, because there’s nothing for it when he’s like this. It’s too late in their relationship for Baze to be surprised by Chirrut knowing more about his thoughts than he should; sometimes it’s just best to let it go.

“So faithful.” Chirrut laughs and something about him settles back into his skin, once more a skinny acolyte not yet grown into his limbs... still beautiful.

He takes Baze’s hand when he brushes by him, tugs him out of the room. They close the door behind them.


End file.
